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Cool discovery this weekend.
Apr. 2nd, 2012 09:57 amLast month's book club read was "Arc of Justice," a book I've known about for several years and have been meaning to get to. I'm so glad we read it. It's about the Ossian Sweet trial. Sweet was a black doctor who moved into an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. The neighbors....were not pleased. They surrounded the house and the occupants (the Doctor, his family, and friends he had invited over for protection) shot out the windows and killed a man in the crowd. All 11 people on the house were arrested and tried for murder. The NAACP got involved and hired Clarence Darrow to defend. So it was a big deal. If you want to know what happened, READ THE BOOK. It's good.
ANYWAY.
This weekend I was tracking down an obituary for Mark's great-grandfather, who died in Detroit in 1927. Found a death notice, and they listed the address where he lived on Garland Avenue. Garland, Garland....why does that sound familiar? Waitaminnit, the Ossian Sweet house was on Garland. Pull up a map and find that they lived just a few blocks down. Nana (Mark's grandma) was 18 when the Sweet case happened, so I think she was still living there at the time.
It kind of blew me away to think I'd read this entire book thinking how faraway that era of Detroit seemed to me... never even thinking about how Nana lived through it, and certainly never dreaming that it was her neighborhood. I sat there in front of the microfilm machine thinking about it for the longest time. I know that if I asked Nana about it, I would probably get a very unwelcome reminder of her nasty biases, but regardless I wish she were around to ask (she is not; she died in 2004). I am eager to ask Mark's dad if she ever talked about it.
ANYWAY.
This weekend I was tracking down an obituary for Mark's great-grandfather, who died in Detroit in 1927. Found a death notice, and they listed the address where he lived on Garland Avenue. Garland, Garland....why does that sound familiar? Waitaminnit, the Ossian Sweet house was on Garland. Pull up a map and find that they lived just a few blocks down. Nana (Mark's grandma) was 18 when the Sweet case happened, so I think she was still living there at the time.
It kind of blew me away to think I'd read this entire book thinking how faraway that era of Detroit seemed to me... never even thinking about how Nana lived through it, and certainly never dreaming that it was her neighborhood. I sat there in front of the microfilm machine thinking about it for the longest time. I know that if I asked Nana about it, I would probably get a very unwelcome reminder of her nasty biases, but regardless I wish she were around to ask (she is not; she died in 2004). I am eager to ask Mark's dad if she ever talked about it.
